Know Ebonics? The U.S. Department of Justice Wants You!

NewsFeed readers, all those hours spent watching The Wire have finally paid off!

The Justice Department is looking for nine linguists with a knowledge of American Ebonics to “monitor, translate and transcribe” DEA recordings of drug dealers. These recordings will include “telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media,” which means wiretaps, we think. Applicants with a knowledge of the ATL scene will have a leg up; the investigations will be run out the DEA’s Atlanta office.

To paraphrase Sen. Clay Davis, “Sh******************t, what an amazing opportunity.”

Ebonics is the popular term for what academics call African-American vernacular English. As linguist John Rickford explains, Ebonics is not just slang:

“Ebonics includes non-slang words like ashy (referring to the appearance of dry skin, especially in winter) which have been around for a while, and are used by people of all age groups. Ebonics also includes distinctive patterns of pronunciation and grammar, the elements of language on which linguists tend to concentrate because they are more systematic and deep-rooted.”

Rickford also quotes Toni Morrison’s words of appreciation for Ebonics and its “five present tenses”: “The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language.”